BioShock Infinite Reviews Hit the Web; Almost a Full House for Columbia

BioShock Infinite Arrives

BioShock Infinite is a title that people have been waiting for, salivating over, for years, and now it’s finally here. My Premium Edition of the game should be arriving any moment now – hurry up damn it! – but if you’re still on the fence, then there are many fine reviews around the internet that you can take a look at. Those lucky folks that have been able to play the game long before any of us have done a fine job of reviewing BioShock Infinite and they’re certainly worth a read. I’ll be able to give my own impressions of the game once I get some gameplay with the new title, as someone who loved BioShock and BioShock 2, I’m eagerly awaiting another immersive experience other titles can only hope to offer.

The first-person shooter genre has gotten a little stale as of late, and as a player of Battlefield 3 and more recently, Crysis 3, I can testify to the genre’s sameyness. Now that BioShock Infinite is finally released I’m happy to see it making noise throughout the gaming media for all the right reasons.

With so much going on in BioShock Infinite, there’s a lot of ground to cover and a lot of reviews have gone in-depth, without spoiling the story – thanks guys! – and key areas are spoken about candidly. For instance, on Elizabeth, your companion and lynch pin throughout the game:

BioShock Infinite Reviews

PC Gamer (91/100) – “Elizabeth herself is nice. I liked her. If you were hoping for something more – perhaps even the fabled Strong Female Character™ – you might be disappointed. When you’re together, she’s relegated to the role of caddy, limited to passing you a new weapon when you run out of ammo, and only ever using her own abilities when you command her to.”

Polygon (10/10) – “Elizabeth’s assistance is stunningly predictive. In other games this sort of semi-psychic bond between the player-as-Booker and Elizabeth would seem, well, convenient. But BioShock Infinite spends so much time building a tense, believable relationship between the pair that the symbiotic arrangement makes sense.”

Combat and heavy violence being key elements of any BioShock game, it’s good to see they’ve got it right again this time around:

Game Informer (10/10) – “Booker’s tools in combat are less mysterious. He plows through enemies using firearms, brute force, and creative powers. I picked off foes with my shotgun as they fought off the murder of crows I summoned. I possessed a robotic George Washington and watched him cut down my Columbian aggressors. I jumped on the roller coaster-like skyline, boarded an airship, and jammed my skyhook into a foe’s throat.”

Eurogamer (100/100) – “The pace of combat is still frantic, thanks to fast-moving and often devastatingly accurate enemies. The basic types are unremarkable, but others have more character, like the Patriots, motorized Founding Fathers who trundle forward peppering you with rockets, losing their Jefferson and Washington visages after a headshot to reveal a glaring metal skull that keeps on coming. The gorilla-like Handyman, meanwhile, can close the gap to you in seconds from anywhere in the environment and flatten you in even less time.”

The upsetting worlds and attention to detail have always been hallmarks of Irrational Games under Ken Levine’s creative leadership and it’s apparent they’ve put something truly special together in BioShock Infinite. In the same way you still remember 2007’s Rapture, you’ll remember Columbia for years to come:

Edge (90/100) – “Like Rapture, Columbia indoctrinates its citizens through a familiar mix of cheery propaganda and vaudevillian exhibits. And like Rapture, it tells much of its story via characters who presumably spend a fortune replacing the audiotapes that they carelessly scatter about on their morning walks.”

Videogamer (8/10) – “As setups go, it’s a far more interesting setting than most shooters that aren’t also called BioShock. It enables Irrational to explore the blackness that hides behind the white picket fence of American life. One of your first acts involves defending (or not…) a couple from torture-as-entertainment; baseball, America’s pastime, turned into Columbia’s punishment.”

What’s your BioShock Infinite review? Share it with us in the comments below.